This New Dating App Uses Augmented Reality to Find Your True Love

Move over Tinder, the world’s first augmented reality dating app is here. FlirtAR uses facial recognition, geolocation, and augmented reality to help you find the love of your life.

FlirtAR is the brainchild of Renan Godinho who explains his motivation behind starting the dating app, “People waste lots of time with traditional dating apps, they spend hours and hours of their valuable time looking for someone they never meet.”

FlirtAR encourages you to meet 'the one' in real time

The dating app will be available on both iOS and Android devices and it uses facial recognition and geolocation data to find your matches. The dating app is designed to be used ‘out in the real world’.

Imagine you are out in the city and you see someone that catches your eye. You then point your phone at them and if they are also a registered user then their profile data and likely compatibility are displayed. If you like what you see, you can instantly send a message, and hope they have push notifications enabled! From there you can (hopefully) take the flirtation into real time. The app is marketed as being less of a time waster than other apps that encourage a lot of back and forth of messages before meeting up IRL.

The execution of the app sounds a little clumsy. Pointing your phone at someone while trying to be subtle doesn't seem the best way to start a romance. While the facial recognition part of the software does sound exciting we are curious to see just how accurate it is. Trying to capture and recapture someone's face before you've even spoken to them is pretty weird.

The last possible flaw of the app is that it requires you to go out in the world and look for potential matches. This is exactly the reason why online dating took off in the first place. This might be a bit of a barrier for the shy types out there.

But flaws aside the app is no doubt cool and a huge step forward in the potential of augmented reality. A technology that we haven’t seen put to its full potential yet.

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Another app added to the growing list

Tinder launched in 2014 and is still considered the most popular, though Bumble is close behind. Bumble only works for hetero hookups, gaining its popularity by giving the power to the women in the exchanges. If you are looking to really find ‘the one’ then OkCupid might be the way to to go. It takes some dedication to get a profile set up, but the investment is likely to pay off. In recent time online dating has shed its stigma and has become a ubiquitous part of millennial living.

The founder of FlirtAR is the Brazilian entrepreneur Renan Godinho. The app will be available for iOS download on September 30th and Android devices on October 30th. If you want to be one of their early adopters, head to their website now to sign up for alerts.

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